Joe Newton
Co-founder · Condri
Joe Newton is a co-founder of Condri. He started it after years of living with health anxiety and OCD, and not finding the self-help resources he needed.
A sensation would arrive, his mind would make it urgent, and he would search, book, test, or ask someone to tell him it was nothing. In one year it ran to more than twenty visits to A&E. The lowest point was pushing for a colonoscopy after weeks of worrying about a stomach ache, because he could not sit with not knowing any longer. It came back clear, and that's when he knew for sure he had health anxiety.
What changed it was not another test. It was starting CBT and ERP, and slowly learning to sit with the frightening thoughts instead of rushing to solve them. That is the idea Condri is built on, and it is why the app declines to reassure people even when reassurance is what they are asking for.
He hosts the Condri podcast, where he puts the questions he used to ask to people who can actually answer them: psychiatrists, doctors, and people who have been through it themselves.
What I am and am not qualified to say
I have lived with health anxiety and OCD. I am not a clinician, and nothing I say is medical advice or a substitute for it. What I can tell you is what the loop felt like from the inside and what helped me get out of it. Where Condri makes a clinical claim, it comes from published research and the psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors we work with, not me.
Conversations he hosts
Clinicians on what health anxiety is and how it is treated, and people who have lived it on what it was actually like.
Health Anxiety Explained: Why You Think You're Dying (When You're Not)
Dr Karen Bowles · 25:25
OCD Explained: Intrusive Thoughts, Compulsions & Health Anxiety
Prof Lynne Drummond · 44:44
Health Anxiety, Body Checking & Social Media Triggers
35:09
The Reality of Health Anxiety
47:04
How I overcame severe health anxiety
42:09
I wrote a song about health anxiety
25:08